How to Lose a Country

A Turkish journalist and novelist lays out seven steps from democracy to dictatorship, lived in real time as she watched Erdoğan's Turkey transform—steps that run from "create a movement" and "disrupt rationality" to "design your own citizen" and "build your own country."

Her account is deliberately personal and literary rather than academic. She is interested in the emotional and cultural machinery of authoritarian populism: the manufacture of a wounded, resentful "real people," the collapse of shame as a restraint on leaders, and the slow erosion of any shared reality.

A recurring theme is the seduction of disbelief—the way ordinary, educated people keep insisting "it can't happen here" or "he'll never actually do that" until each unthinkable thing becomes normal. That reassurance, she argues, is itself one of the steps.

Written as a warning to Western readers who assume their institutions make them immune, it reads like a dispatch from someone who has already watched the movie end: part memoir, part manual for recognizing the slide while you are still inside it.

The spectre of alternative truth—highly organised, large-scale lies—that haunts the establishment today was heralded by the normalisation of shamelessness.— How to Lose a Country